Refining the Familiar for Author Barbara Goldsmith

Like a reluctant bride, best-selling author and historian Barbara Goldsmith said yes only with hesitation. “I really didn’t want to renovate. But I’m on the 17th floor, with windows on all sides, and I’ve never been in an apartment with such gorgeous light. I thought I’d open up the space a bit, but it was like revising the first draft of a book: I couldn’t just touch it up. I had to rewrite the entire apartment.”

With 12-foot ceilings at the top of a venerable Park Avenue dowager, Goldsmith’s apartment still had an Edwardian layout that compartmentalized the light and separated the formal and family rooms from a staff she didn’t have. She decided to merge the living room, dining room and library into a 62-foot-long space, revealing a sweep of windows, and to combine the staff quarters into an expanded, open kitchen.

“I was coming from a traditional apartment and wanted the look of a loft,” she says. “After all, it’s 2006, and I don’t do needlepoint. I needed a real working office with enough room for two computers. I wanted to have a library that doubled as a dining room, where I could be surrounded by the books I love.”

Goldsmith emerged from the first phase of the renovation with a well-planned, contemporary architectural shell, but she didn’t yet have a home. Enter Mica Ertegun, of MAC II, a designer who practices the fine art of creating comfort and elegance from the familiar. She fluently mixes furniture and objects from different times and places, putting that 18th- century French bergère next to a Chinese-style chair or a modern chair with an antique French desk. The common threads are quality, individuality and authenticity. She uses only natural fabrics and eschews bright colors and high contrast. Understated hues with rich undertones unify it into a mellow whole.

“We do simple things without being minimalist,” says Ertegun, whose associate Mica Duffy collaborated on the project. “Barbara asked us to put it all together. Her main interests were her books and her paintings, about which she’s passionate.”

Goldsmith didn’t care whether Ertegun used her old furniture, but, she recalls, “Mica said, ‘Let’s see what you have. Those two Cresson fauteuils are gorgeous. Let’s use your mother’s coromandel low table, and that Déco vase.’ She took my Ruhlmann bed out of storage. But she touched everything with a magic wand. She has this incredible talent for pulling things together, and an infallible sense of scale.”

“As long as you have good pieces, you can mix anything,” explains Ertegun. “But it all has to be considered within a global view.”

The designer found places for paintings and for the furniture from Goldsmith’s previous apartment and added pieces, including an Art Déco dining table that doubles as a library table, which she found at a Paris flea market. She arranged the furniture and paintings into a comfortable but complex mix.

The result is an intimacy bred of detail: Furniture, paintings and family pictures weave in a way that makes Goldsmith’s 4,500-square-foot apartment autobiographical. For this historian, personal memory blurs into cultural memory. In a corner of the lofty space, a gold wreath and a rare statue of a reclining figure, both Roman, stand next to a recent grisaille drawing by Stone Roberts, all on an 18th-century Dutch marquetry table with spiral legs. The stretch of windows frames city views, as if bringing Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie inside to complement the collection.

The whole interior transmits Goldsmith’s keen intellectual curiosity. In the guest room, a signed Cartier-Bresson photograph dedicated to Goldsmith faces a David Salle paint-by-number work. Books by James Joyce share a shelf in the study with pictures of Goldsmith in her early journalism days, on sets with Cary Grant and Clark Gable. Another picture shows her in Angkor Wat.

“Design has to look effortless,” says Goldsmith. “It’s the same for a writer or a dancer—it needs to just flow, and that’s what Mica does so well. But she’s also a problem solver. I like to seat 24 at dinner. Until she came, I thought I’d have to have two tables, or maybe one against the wall. This is the perfect library and dining table. Form follows function.”

In this renovation, the great reward, besides the light, is the reunion between the bibliophile and 100 boxes of books exhumed from storage. On a typical afternoon, Goldsmith has volumes spread out on the dining table, with another stack by the wing chair in the corner, where she likes to read between a loft-size painting by Larry Rivers and the view onto her quadrant of Manhattan’s Boogie Woogie. Ertegun has created a design in which Goldsmith can settle in, spread out and live her thoughts—a portrait space in which she can be herself, simply.